They’d have to be idiots to believe NATO and the US after the lie of “not one inch east of a reunified Germany”.
If that were not the case, then the world would go to shit because you'd have every disingenuous patent-troll mindsetted asshole who's found some agreement made with a long dead country resurrecting it for bullshit reasons. We'd have assholes with bits of paper that say "Czechoslovakia" on it holding two totally separate and totally independent countries to agreements they never signed. I bet there's paperwork out there that doesn't distinguish North Korea from South Korea either. And so on. It is a retarded, RETARDED argument.
So get your facts right.
A promise was made TO THE SOVIET UNION that as long as the SOVIET UNION remained as a geopolitical reality, NATO would not expand eastward into the USSR or Warsaw Pact.
NATO did not and could not violate any such promise, either in spirit or in fact because the SOVIET UNION and Warsaw Pact were dissolved over 30 years ago. Alongside its dissolution, the Warsaw Pact and 1922 Union Treaty were also dissolved. The end result was a Commonwealth comprised of INDEPENDENT COUNTRIES which included Ukraine, Belarus and a NEW country called the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic which was then renamed to the Russian Federation.
Not only that, the Commonwealth chair wasn't even Russian. It was in Minsk. That's why you have Minsk 0 (the Belovezha Accords), Minsk 1 and Minsk 2, all signed in, er, BELARUS not in Russia.
Don't believe me? Check this. https://www.prlib.ru/en/history/619792 - from the Boris Yeltsin Presidential Library:
December 8, 1991 in the village of Viskuly, Belarus, the Heads of State and Governments of the three republics: Boris Yeltsin and Gennady Burbulis (RSFSR), Stanislav Shushkevich and Vyacheslav Kebich (Belarus), Leonid Kravchuk, and Witold Fokin (Ukraine) signed the so-called "Belovezha Accords" on the demise of the USSR and the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS).
The preamble of the document stated that "the USSR as a subject of international law and a geopolitical reality no longer exists."
Article 1 ... Parties accepted and respected the territorial integrity of each other and the inviolability of existing borders within the Commonwealth
...At the same time Russia dissolved the Union Treaty of 1922. December 21, 1991 the Accords were joined by Azerbaijan, Armenia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan. In the city of Alma-Ata (Kazakhstan), the heads of these countries, along with Belarus, Russia and Ukraine, signed the Declaration on the establishment of the Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) on an equal footing. ....
December 25, 1991 the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR approved the Law of the RSFSR "On renaming of the state of the Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic", which took effect immediately The new name of the state was the Russian Federation (Russia).
So even Russia admits, in writing, in its historical records, that the entire premise of the "not one inch eastward" claim is redundant. Because the minute it admitted the USSR didn't exist anymore, announced the dissolution of the Union Treaty, agreed that the three states (RSFSR and Belarus and Ukraine) were independent of each other AND held equal status in the new CIS, agreed that their national borders were "inviolable", affirmed that each had its own right to its own "territorial integrity", and enshrined the concept of a Commonwealth based in Belarus, EVERY agreement between NATO and the USSR was defunct. Torn up. Consigned to the dusbin of history. Rendered irrelevant. And it wasn't NATO that did it. The RSFSR, Belarus and Ukraine leaders did it.
Which treaty says "“not one inch east"? "Treaty on the Final Settlement with Respect to Germany" ONLY pertains to the territory of the former GDR, banning NATO troops.
The treaty does not mention NATO membership prospects of any other countries, as none of them has been a party to the treaty... In 2014, Gorbachev said that the assurance only pertained to East Germany, and that the resulting agreement was upheld by NATO. His main aide in these negotiations, Eduard Shevardnadze, likewise agreed that NATO never made any such commitment regarding other countries in Eastern Europe, and that "the question never came up" in the talks on German reunification.That is presumably because all of the countries in question were still in the Warsaw Pact at the time and hosted large Soviet garrisons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_on_the_Final_Settlement_with_Respect_to_Germany